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Media & Streaming

Design TikTok (Video processing and recommendation feed)

A short-video platform combining a heavy transcoding pipeline with a real-time, engagement-driven recommendation engine powering the "For You" feed.

Open and Simulate this Architecture in InfraDraft

Core Architectural Components

Video Upload & Transcoding Pipeline

Converts uploads into multiple adaptive-bitrate renditions.

Adaptive Bitrate Transcoding Workers

Horizontally-scaled compute fleet doing the actual encoding work.

Object Storage for Video Segments

Holds encoded segments referenced by playback manifests.

Edge CDN for Video Delivery

Serves segments from close to the viewer for low-latency playback start.

Recommendation/Ranking Engine

Drives the For You feed from engagement and embedding signals.

Engagement Event Stream

Captures watch time, likes, shares, and completion rate in real time.

Feature Store

Serves user and video embeddings to the ranking model with low latency.

Content Moderation Pipeline

Automated + human review before content is broadly distributed.